On March 20, 2018, Dr. Bart de Keijzer (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, Amsterdam) will give a talk about "Algorithmic Mechanism Design for Markets" in the context of the SFB 901.

Abstract:

In this talk I will talk about some of my recent work on mechanisms for two sided markets. I will first briefly talk about mechanism design and algorithmic mechanism design (AMD) in general, where I will sketch the general approach, and the type of questions that we are interested in within this field. Market mechanisms have been a recent topic of interest in AMD. This may be attributed to the increasing prominence of internet applications that essentially function as market platforms, and to the interesting and challenging mechanism design questions that this gives rise to.

My own contributions to this research theme deal with designing feasible mechanisms for two-sided markets with a provably good quality in terms of social welfare (i.e., total utility) and gain from trade (i.e., increase in utility). I will focus primarily on a recent result that characterises how well a feasible mechanism can perform in a bilateral trade setting, which is the most simple version of a two sided market where there is only a single buyer, a single seller, and a single item to be traded. I will then extend this result to settings with many buyers and sellers and show that there exists a very simple mechanism with performance arbitrarily close to the theoretical optimum, as the number of buyers and sellers grows.

These results are based on joint work with Riccardo Colini-Baldeschi, Paul Goldberg, Stefano Leonardi, Tim Roughgarden, and Stefano Turchetta.